AWAKENING

A Novelet by BRYCE WALTON

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Startling Stories Summer 1955.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

The scream of the commutor jet bringing Kelsey home broke like glass outside the house.

Startled, Alice realized that she was behind schedule in her household duties. Quickly she switched the news off the Tevee. Master Kelsey hated newscasts. They made him uneasy, particularly with all this talk about a possible air-raid.

Instead, she hurriedly tuned in Kelsey's evening preference: self-improvement commercials with the latest pop-tunes for background.

She turned up her thermostat so that her machinery would run a little faster. If she wasn't careful, Master Kelsey would trade her in for a more modern and physically attractive domestic.

In another few seconds he would be there, real, breathing, but unobtainable, a living dream, something on the other side of the looking glass.

Oh the pain, the indescribable pain of love, greater and deeper and drowning love, going out and out all the time and never coming back again. Painful, painful unrequited love.

The cumulative loneliness, the hours of lonely loving, the hours and days and weeks and years of tireless mechanical walking in the indifferent round of the hours of her life. The loneliness of loving something that can never love in return, that doesn't even know of your love, that can't even conceive of your being able to love.

For you are only a machine and your soul can never be shared; for only you know that you have a soul, and it is an accident and no one could even suspect that it could possibly be—this crying hungry, yearning, lonely soul.

Without effort she could have cried out her heart to Master Kelsey, but she had not been made to cry, and no one would think of looking for her heart or soul. Or the lonely yearning of the heart or soul.

For the soul can be trapped in ugliness, or in the slashing streak of electrons. Dying there, the soul alone can mourn its dying, for who can feel the soul in the rectifiers and diodes, or behind the ugliness of a distorted shell?

It was very good for her, she thought, that no one, no human, including Master Kelsey could ever guess at the awful intensity, the terrible hunger of the soul that kept loving in silence, alone, in the dark, behind the plastoid walls of an inhuman shell.

Master Kelsey came into the living room, tall and broad and beautiful and neat in his business suit, his blond hair in a waving shine. But with that tired sharp look to his mouth in spite of its frozen smile. He always seemed so relieved to see her standing there waiting, responsive, receptive, an understanding shadow that filled up his frightened loneliness between the time of his arrival and the absorption in Tevee, or the always demanded presence of guests.

He leaned wearily against the wall, breathing heavily as though he had been running from something for a long time.

"Hello, hello, Alice," he said quickly, forcing exaggerated joy into the greeting to conceal something full of fear.

"Fine! It was great, simply perfect!" He said it almost fiercely, as though even a robot might challenge the statement.

As he stared at the Tevee's hypnotic glow, his face began to relax a little. "Everybody," he whispered, "was happy today. The Manager gave our office group a Silver Star for being tops in the Group Sociability scale for the week."

He stared at her. "I wish they had made you so you could smile more, Alice. The way you look, it—it gives me a sort of doubtful feeling sometimes."

If you only knew how I felt, my dearest Kelsey, inside, inside the machinery that has the cold and tiny shell. I'm all one great warm smile of joy just to be near you, darling Kelsey.

Why wasn't he happier, she wondered, as she had wondered so many times before. He had all that anyone should need to be happy. In the first place, he was human among many others who were human. And then all the other things, and the woman, the woman he loved, Gloria Tonnencourt, the woman he loved, loved, loved—

Gloria was coming over to see him tonight. Alice would have to watch it again, hear it again. She would have to listen again to love, while she stood alone and frozen in the dark closet of her own longings.

"It's that ten minutes on the commutor to the jet station. Don't they realize that a man is alone those ten minutes? Nobody else to talk to. No Tevee. No sound even. Alone."

"Yes," she said. Yes, the robot says. Yes, my love, everything is ready for your love.

In the bathroom, Kelsey looked in the full length mirror, and Alice watched him.

Kelsey touched his lips and stretched his face muscles. The Mirror said, "People are uneasy when you don't smile."

Alice knew how much Kelsey respected his Mirror. It had cost him so much, and it was the most popular item advertised on Tevee. It was finely attuned to Kelsey's personality. It knew when he was not looking exactly right to meet the strict demands of the crowd.

"Smile and the group will love you," the Mirror said. "Frown, and you may frown alone."

Kelsey was suddenly smiling intensely, as though his very life had been threatened.

Alice had tried so hard and so often to smile, pulling at the plastoid stuff of her face. She guessed that Humans were supposed to smile all the time, and robots never. Why should a robot smile. A robot had nothing to sell. It had routine functions, but it had nothing to sell.

Kelsey zipped himself out of his clothes and jumped into the shower. He was six feet tall. He had blue eyes and wavy hair with streaks of brown in the Viking yellow. His skin was golden and his muscles moved with fluid healthy power. His daily stint in the male beauty clinic at the factory kept him in top condition. And the Mirror was always alert to detect any flaw in his outward appearance.

But who will love you when you're old, Master Kelsey? When the gold turns gray and the muscles shrink and the teeth decay and the eyes turn pale and the body is bent with the squeezing hands of time?

Let me stay, darling Kelsey. Let me stay forever, and I'll love you when you're old.

Seeing his strong naked beauty there, she felt her machinery pounding and the burning in her eyes. It wasn't anything that could be controlled by the thermostat. She needed his arms, and the feel of his power. Like a long wave her love came to her lips in strange words, childish words, moist and tender. And unheard by Master Kelsey.

She turned away. She looked at the blankness of the wall. Please, please let me be careful. If I am not careful I will be sent away, away where there is no Kelsey, away where they will take my soul.

"Do you think Gloria will like me more tonight than she did the last time she was here, Alice?"

The woman's face on the Tevee screen covering one wall of the bathroom was a kind of subtle threat, Alice thought:

"Are you sure you're exercising the maximum acceptability of which your personality is capable? Do you sometimes feel that in some intangible way you are offending your friends? The self-analysis, personology chart scale guarantees to dig out the most hidden blocks to full and joyful acceptance by others. Send for your personology chart at once!"

Alice punched the order button on the side of the wall next to the Tevee screen. Whatever item was being advertised at the time the button was punched was automatically ordered, the consumer's name and address recorded, the price deducted from his salary, and an extra point added to his consumer's cooperative card for the year.

It was not only very important how many items one ordered in a year, but also the kinds of items. Items that aided an employee in being acceptable to the office group were especially smiled upon by Office Managers. Alice had always been careful to get in every such order.

Alice knew all about the system. She knew all about Kelsey's work. She had listened to him talking about it endlessly, either to her or to others. She had watched Kelsey rise from Office Boy to Chief Clerk, getting the glad reports of his progress every evening. She couldn't imagine anyone at the office being more likeable than Kelsey. He was so human, she had thought, so human—

She turned quickly. She could feel fear. Did they know that a robot could feel fear as well as love? Could anyone, or anything, feel one without the other? Did they know that a robot, at least this robot, could feel fear at the idea of being labeled inefficient, and being sent back to the factory and remade, rebuilt, dismantled, changed—and probably having a soul burned out that no one had ever known was there? Did they know that if a robot could feel love or fear, that it could also steal, deliberately steal and hide something?

"I'm sure I brought it home. Well, the only thing to do is mark it as lost, and have another order made out tomorrow. No real hurry I guess. Only one more receptionist to be replaced."

She had stolen it. She had hidden it. She would never never use it of course. That would be impossible, too risky, too frightening even to think about actually doing. But it was there to dream about. She was good at dreaming. When you stand alone in the dark of a dark, dark closet every night, and when you're alone almost all the time of the day or night, dreaming becomes an art, a necessary art. It becomes the shield against dying inside, losing the soul, being the robot you were originally designed to be.

It was there, hidden in her closet. She stood alone with it at night in the dark closet, and with the dream—a piece of paper, an order blank—she was not so much alone....

Kelsey stood under the perfumed deodorant spray for three minutes. He ran out to the sink and sprayed his mouth with Noffend. And then he held his mouth open while Alice brushed his teeth carefully with Ivory-Glo. He zipped into his lounge suit of coral pink and ran to the Mirror.

Alice watched Kelsey's love, who didn't seem to see Alice at all when she came in, but then domestics had no meaning to anyone but their Masters. Gloria—golden flesh; warm and human love of Kelsey; love in a transparent gown tight and clinging to the flesh; warm and waiting love. Love-kissing and kissing—but Alice tried not to look at love.

Some time ago, she had liked looking at love, but now she felt fear, fear of love-kissing. She felt an intense hunger that had elements of terror blended with elements of awakening as she looked at it, trying not to look or feel any connection with it.

But she felt the desire, growing from evening to evening as she remembered or looked at, Kelsey and his love-loving and hugging and kissing—the desire to hold him, to feel him her own, so as never to let him leave, never let him escape, never let herself be taken from him and rebuilt and lost. And that was the cause of the desire, making it agonizingly stronger. And the sight of it—the sight and sound of the loving, the kisses, the motions of loving—were more and more unbearable.

Gloria was beautiful, so beautiful. She was slim and warm and tall and curved and human.

But Alice had to look just the same, as though there was some last justification in looking because it could never happen to Alice, because they were human and she was not.

And then, as Alice watched, they seemed to draw slowly apart as though the face, the color, the sound and voices from the Tevee was throwing an invisible wall between them. They were staring at the Tevee longer and longer and finally they weren't looking at one another at all.

There were always a number of people present inside the Tevee frame. If one person was talking, the background was full of people—people moving, dancing, walking, but there just the same, always.

The woman was smiling intensely out of the screen. "Don't be left out," she said. "Be a solid member of your group. You can own a Sky-Splitter jet sporter now without offending your crowd. Our special consumer's research proves that now at last these amazing Sky-Splitters are no longer conspicuous items, but are fully accepted as normal by over ninety-three per cent of the consumer public. You can enjoy the cloud thrills of a Sky-Splitter without being considered in any way eccentric. Press your Interest or Order button now! An immediate demonstration will be arranged!"

Dancers swirled. A Sky-Splitter jet dissolved from clouds. It was as if a dream had become abruptly real. Surrounded by people laughing and accepting one another, the sleek projectile gave the warmest impression of itself being organic and one of the happy, happy crowd.

"I don't care," Gloria pouted. "I'd still feel kind of—well—like I was showing off if I had a Sky-Splitter."

Alice wondered when they were really going to make love. Like the lovers were always never quite doing on Tevee. But Alice decided she would never look at that. It would hurt too much.

Another self-improvement commercial. This time a man with a ballet in the background.

"Are you in tune with your crowd? If you do not feel that your tastes are in perfect accord with the tastes of your group, send for the Reacto Tester. This mechanical device, when attached to the brain, records accurate tastes. It insures comforting conformity, and protects you against the anxieties of conspicuousness. Remember, you can't stray from the norm with a Reacto."

Kelsey and his love had moved apart now. They were staring at the Tevee. Everything the Tevee had to say seemed to involve getting along with people, being loved, being liked, being accepted, not being rejected, not offending, how to love efficiently, how to be loved gracefully—

Waiting to look just right, to smile just right. It was a matter of appearance. No one knew that better than Alice did who looked all wrong and could never look any different, never look human, never look full of love.

You smiled when you loved. You smiled and your flesh turned warm. If you had flesh. If your warmth was not a dial to be turned up or down. If on the outside you were human so that everyone could know.

Gloria stared on and on into the Tevee while its color flickered over her half sleeping face.

"Well, you can go stand in your closet now. That will give you all night and all day tomorrow to rest. Is everything taken care of around the place for Tuesday?"

Kelsey smiled at Alice. He whispered low, "She likes me a little more, don't you think so, Alice?"

Kelsey laughed as she bowed slightly and walked out onto the porch and opened the door of her closet and got inside and stood there, the four walls almost touching her when the door closed and she stood alone in the loneliness of her darkness and silence.

For a long time it had been a rich darkness filled with an ever growing understanding of herself in a world alone, in a darkness all her own, where there could never be others of her kind, and lonely darkness was her only friend.

But it was different now. Love made the loneliness unbearable. Love turned lonely darkness to stabbing pain. Now it seemed like death. No, death was nothing. This was worse than death. This was not being, unbeing. A being that was not a being, but something never able to break from its shell, staying shut up forever in its mechanical confines.

They did not give me life, she thought. They sat me down before the world's stage to watch without being able to understand. Now I understand, but I cannot live.

She clenched her hands and trembled in the dark, and felt the quickening beat of the things that made her run.

In the dark, the suffocating dark now that she knew what it could mean to really be alive and not one of the walking dead. In the dark, alone, dreaming of Kelsey, dreaming of human heart touching human heart, of the lips of his kiss, of his arms around her neck; longing for the face of Kelsey next to her own in darkness lit by love, to take his mouth, to cover his body with kisses, to clasp his neck in her hands—

And there alone where she had dreamed a thousand dreams, she knew she could no longer merely dream. Dreams were not enough.

A silent scream shrieked inside the narrow closet and cut the dark to tatters, and she ran out, out into the back yard of Kelsey's house and stood under the open sky.

She had the order blank, the paper, in her hand. A thing stolen, the result of an act no robot could be guilty of because no robot had a soul.

But I have a soul. There is a point at which the soul is sick. At this point one awakens—awakens or dies.

Clutching the paper she had stolen from her love, she ran toward the Commutor jet station. Nowhere was there a light; not even from the city ten miles from the housing project in which Kelsey lived. But Alice had no thought whatever of an air-raid. There were worse darknesses than a blackout. There were worse ways to die than under a rain of white fire bombs.

The fear was over. There was only hope. The commitment was made. Nothing could be worse than the way it had been, and failure could be only a final admission of a defeat that had been there all the time.

She got off the Commutor Jet at the uptown station and walked through darkness. She walked alone in the city. No human being would have been walking in the darkness. They were hovering together behind blacked-out windows in groups. But she felt nothing as she walked in the blackness.

She hurried faster and faster. At no moment in her life had she felt dawning in her such a hope of happiness, such a feeling of ecstasy. At no time, even in her deepest dreams, had she dreamed that she might really be loved by Master Kelsey.

It was such a daring scheme that she even hesitated to think about it, afraid it might be merely a projection of a dream.

FIX ME PLEASE!
Make me beautiful!
MAKE ME PLEASANT TO THE
CUSTOMERS, AND A LOVELY
ROBOT TO REMEMBER!

Alice was a domestic. She was not supposed to carry that order to the Clinic and be fixed up. The order blank was strictly for specialized receptionist robots, office workers, robots that had to have a different sort of front to meet the consumer public. Originally, all robots had been made to look alike. But now, for psychological reasons, it had been decided to change the outward appearance of receptionists and other robots that met the general public.

They had to be lovely to look at, and be able to smile in the most pleasant way possible.

Laboring robots, domestics, their form was more functional than beautiful. It lacked the surface polish of the office-working robots. And yet Alice knew that one of the beautiful receptionist robots for example was indeed beautiful, and that it was almost impossible to distinguish them from beautiful human beings.

It was daring and risky enough to be going to the clinic to pretend she was a receptionist from Kelsey's office, there to be beautified. It was a lot more risky and daring to have the idea that she might be beautiful enough to pass herself off, at least for a little while, as a human being!

But she had one big advantage. They would never suspect her. They had no idea, she was sure of that, that any robot could act of her own free will, and steal an order blank, and pretend to be something she was not in order to be made beautiful.

A receptionist robot looked just like a beautiful human woman. She only acted like a robot. But if I looked like that, so beautiful, I could feel human too. I could be human.

Kelsey could give back my love to me, and our hearts would kiss and loneliness would die.

This was Monday. Tomorrow was her rest day. She wouldn't be missed as Alice the domestic until Wednesday morning.

She didn't want to think about what might happen after that. There would have to be something happen when Alice the domestic was reported missing. But then she was running way ahead of herself. It was still only a hope that her scheme would work the way she had to dream that it would.

She went in out of the dark into the Clinic building. The receptionist behind the shiny chrome desk in the outer office hardly looked at Alice at all. Alice looked at her though. It was impossible to tell whether the receptionist was human or not. But she was beautiful. As beautiful as Gloria Tonnencourt.

Sitting there, waiting, she felt as though something steel-edged had smashed into her chest. She felt cold, and adjusted her thermostat slightly. The steely sensation increased. Her hands were clenched. She felt something inside of her pounding and pounding.

I can tell you all my thoughts at last now, Master Kelsey, darling darling Kelsey. I can tell you all the hopes without achievement, all about the endless dark hours alone—

Her number was called and she went in through a door that seemed to lead into an endlessly narrowing white funnel lined with shiny doors.

The room of hope was a square white box filled with shiny chrome cabinets. In the center was a table on little silent rubber wheels, with a lamp looking down upon it like a gigantic unblinking eye.

A slight willowy man gushed at her and gripped her arms with exuberance, and covered her over with the moist film of his bright and eager eyes.

His voice was high and shrill. "So you want to be beautiful, lovely to look at?"

"You shall be, my dear. Lie down please, lie down and trust me. You will have to trust me, of course. Simply have to trust me just the same."

"Ha, ha, my dear!" He was pushing and pulling and finally she was lying down and staring at the whirling lines of the white ceiling and seeing Kelsey's smiling waiting yearning face in it. "That is a joke, a very funny joke. The receptionist out there is a human being. At least she would lead the unsuspecting to believe that she is. However, I must confess, my dear, that I have learned the sad truth that she is human in name only, that her heart is ice, and she is bitter with ambition."

"Ah, but beauty is as beauty does, my dear. Or as beauty thinks. And sweet little ambitious Della in the outer office does not think lovely thoughts. Not at all, believe me. I have learned that from sad experience."

His hands hovered over her eagerly, fluidly, as though there were no bones in them.

"You are fortunate in having been sent to Julian. I promise that under my touch you shall blossom into radiant beauty, the essence of feminine loveliness. You will be simply devastating."

He placed the tips of his long white fingers together and studied her with his head angled like a bird's. "A brunette, I think—"

"Oh, you would, would you, my dear! You seem extraordinarily concerned for a robot." He stepped back and studied her curiously and the black eyes sharpened like narrowing beams of black searching light.

"You know," he said softly, "I studied in the greatest Salons of the continent to beautify women. Now I specialize in beautifying robots. Why? Simple but paradoxical, but not as paradoxical as it might seem. I can make a robot lovelier than a human."

"Exactly. Much lovelier. Beauty comes from within as the sages say. It comes from the heart and the soul, my dear. And so few humans any longer have either heart or soul. Of course, that would imply that robots do have hearts and souls, so please, my dear, do not repeat what I have said. Already I am thought to be excessively eccentric for this sad conformistic age of orthodoxy and stupid unimaginative dependency. Beauty comes from individuality and strength, my dear. It comes from sadness and the ability to admit a sense of tragedy. Ah—but it is sad for me, for Julian, my dear. That my fulfillment comes only from adding a sense of life to humanoids. And looking at you—the likes of you—sometimes I wonder if you—"

His voice trailed off like smoke and he shrugged and waved his hands in the air. "So you want to be a blonde. Why a blonde?"

He kissed the tips of his fingers and rolled his eyes. "Your wish shall be granted. I, Julian, will outdo myself." He leaned over her. His voice was low. "Why is it that a robot can be made more beautiful than a human? Tell me, my dear, tell me and I shall never tell anyone else. Do you have a soul? Do you have a heart? Do you know what it is to be sad and alone and can you find some pleasure in it? Do you perhaps even find pleasure in yourself, and sometimes find it unnecessary to swim in a sea of humanity like a brainless protozoon?"

He straightened up slowly. He touched his forehead, where beads of sweat were forming, and slowly he licked his thin red lips.

His hands moved over her. He bent above her. A cabinet slid open. She caught the glint of many different colors of eyeballs looking startlingly real and liquidly alive, and rows of variously sized breasts, and lips, and muscle paddings, and eyelashes and eyebrows and ears and noses and fingers. There were gleaming instruments and jars and plastic tapes.

His face was close above hers and his lips worked nervously. He whispered, "I can see how it will be, my dear. You will feel so real to the touch of a hungry love that I shall be broken-hearted to let you go from my Pygmalion Palace of dreams come true. My dear, believe me. Believe Julian when he tells you this—there is no lonelier being in the world than a man who has not forgotten what beauty is in a world that has turned ugly from having lost its soul."

Then she knew that Julian had turned off her thermostat. Suddenly there was no feeling, no sound, no sight except that of the general blackout rushing in out of the night, down the halls, into the rooms, into her eyes.

How quickly and painlessly a robot could die, she thought. How easy it was to live and die and come back to life. You could be born suddenly full-grown and efficient. You could be blotted out again, just as suddenly. You could be born in any shape or size, born to do any one or combination of so many different things, and when your job was done you could so quickly be put to rest again. You could be born ugly, or round, or square, or like a pyramid, or something almost all arms, or legs, or eyes, or ears.

You could be born beautiful, hardly distinguishable from a beautiful human being who could receive love.

You could be born ugly and then be killed and brought back again as beautiful as a human being.

"Oh God," Julian whispered. He stood in a corner of the room, and his eyes were narrowed and his hands were gripped together. "I knew I was a genius. But this—this is something else! What have I done? Statues turned to living beauty. What in the name of God is this?"

A great calm came over her. A great calm and a great chill. She felt uneasy because she felt so wonderful, too wonderful, too uneasy, as if she might feel too deeply and something inside would break.

She felt Julian's hand on her and he was turning her around. "I must kiss you," he said. "I must kiss you. I love you."

She imagined it was Kelsey kissing her. Kelsey's arms were around her neck, and she was longing for the face of Kelsey. She moved her lips over his forehead and his cheeks until she felt the moistness of his mouth. She saw the unsettled look in Julian's face and the sweat on his upper lip. It was her first kiss, and it was Kelsey she kissed.

Julian stepped back and touched his lips. He shook his head and jerked his face nervously toward the door.

He stared into her eyes. His fingers ran over her face. "Now I see it," he whispered hoarsely. "Now I see it. It was there before, before I ever touched you. It was in your eyes. I've always known that. I've known that no one creates beauty out of pastes and tape and foam rubber and false hair."

"That's right, that's very right. You've got to go out of here, out of my sight and out of my mind!"

"My God! There's this light—that is what you feel—the light! Listen, listen to me whoever, whatever, you are. Listen. What's happening? You're more real than the woman who invites me to her apartment and assures me with insipid smiles and phony gestures that she is real. What's real? You're real—but you can't be real!"

He turned away from her and leaned against the wall. There was a catch in his voice, and she could see the throbbing in the side of his neck. "You had better go now. And tomorrow I won't remember you. I'm probably going crazy. Beginning to believe in my own pitiful wishes. Everyone I know—all of them—shells of phony beauty, something painted on, something stuck on the outside. Nothing real, nothing real at all. And what do I do—dream? Dream of somehow bringing real beauty back. But it never comes back! Beauty comes from inside. I cannot paste it onto the outside of a hollow shell and make beauty come alive!"

He blinked at her, as though startled and afraid. "What has happened with you? How many like you are there? No, I can't start believing such an incredible thing. I'd be lost. Get out! Get out!"

She touched his shoulder. "Goodbye," she said softly. "I know what loneliness is."

When he turned to her again there were tears in his eyes. He whispered, "I believe you do—you really do. But how could it be? How could you have inside of you what we humans are losing?"

She sat in the Commutor Jet, returning to Master Kelsey. She knew that looking like a beautiful woman was not quite enough. She had to know the right things to say. She felt that she did know all the correct retorts, quips, the polite gestures and nuances and intonations that made one innocuously acceptable. She had watched the Tevee for years as they explained how to win people and influence the right friends, and gain the maximum amount of response from the group, from love, from whoever was joining their smile with yours.

She had learned all the controversial things that must never be talked about, and all the popular immediate things that should be talked about incessantly. But she felt an intense need for rehearsal. This had to be successful. She had committed herself. She could not fail. Failure meant a return to the factory and the final fatal twist of the thermostat. It would not be murder, for they were ignorant of the existence of a robot's soul. And she didn't care about the risk. She would feel her love for Kelsey returned; she would feel his arms, his lips, his love. Let them, whoever they were, worry about the disappearance of a drab domestic named Alice.

Alice was dead. Alice had been reborn. Alice had come out of the lonely dark of unborn waste into the living light of love.

She carried on this imagined conversation with Kelsey, rehearsing. No, it was not enough to be filled to overflowing with love. You had to know how to act, you had to smile all the time, you had to say the right things and know when not to speak. Beauty is as beauty does.

"Well," the imaginary Kelsey said, smiling, "do you like Arnso's new hit recording, I'LL ALWAYS WANT YOU, as much as the one he recorded last week?"

"It's wonderful," she said, smiling. "The sweetest thing since WE'LL ALWAYS BE TOGETHER, NO MATTER WHAT. Which reminds me, honey. I'm going to buy one of those new Snap-Grav-Share-The-Fall suits. Don't you think they would be fun?"

"Lots of fun," the imaginary Kelsey said smiling. "Six people instead of three can share it. The more the merrier."

In her mind, the imaginary Kelsey hesitated, then said, "What Quik-Pik book are you reading right now?"

"Well, I like MY DAY AT THE OFFICE. It shows how a woman gets through a day with her fellow workers in her office, how she smiles and is pleasant and well-liked and never loses her temper. It shows all the little tricks you can pull that help you sell yourself."

It sounded right. But there was something wrong. It was the right thing to talk about, but it wasn't what she would prefer to talk about if she were alone with Kelsey. Feeling the way she felt, she didn't think she would want to talk much at all if she were alone with Kelsey.

Anyway, she gave herself a Gold Star for being so sociable with the imaginary Kelsey. She was sure, very sure, she could sell herself to Kelsey.

Only she would have to have another name. Two names. Human names. Something that sounded beautiful.

She would knock on Master Kelsey's door and ask him for someone's address. He was so nice and considerate he would surely ask her in for a drink, or just ask her in, while he gave her directions.

Dry leaves crackled under her as she walked the half-block toward Kelsey's house. The night was black with a few cold stars in the endless vault of sky. It was late, but in almost all the houses you could see the gentle glow of Tevee color through the windows.

There was no sound at all where the houses of the project, all looking exactly the same, dwindled away into darkness like lines of dots made by a typewriter.

It was, she thought, as though everyone and everything in the world were waiting, waiting for the great white hot scream to explode in the night, the great awakening, the blinding hot flash of awakening that comes before the end. But Alice didn't feel afraid at all of an air-raid as she walked up onto Master Kelsey's porch and rang the bell. There had been so many false alarms, she wondered sometimes if there was any real threat at all. The war—a vague thing far away, never here, always somewhere else, but always supposed to be getting nearer. The war with the Asians—it just went on and on, you heard about it, and saw it on Tevee if you weren't afraid to look at the newscasts, but it never seemed to happen here.

His footsteps behind the door. The door opening. His shadow there, the pink lounge suit, the wavy hair with streaks of brown in the Viking yellow, the face sleepy from Tevee coming awake as he saw the beautiful woman standing there smiling. He smiled. Their smiles met.

The great hope dawned in her as he smiled at her in a way no robot had ever been smiled at. A tender calm moved over her. The machinery that made her go, the sparks that made her live, all seemed to jump and tremble under the beautiful shell that had been created by the hands of Julian.

The great joy filled her, surged inside her. She could be near, so near him, now that she had the right look and the right smile. She could tell him and show him how she loved to be near him—No, she would not have to tell him that; he would know. Real love you just knew about. You didn't have to say it. She would just kiss him and kiss him and never have to tell him—

"This is Carnegie Way," Kelsey was saying. His eyes were fixed on her face, then his eyes were brightening as they looked at her height and her slim rich curves. "But it's five blocks from the address you're looking for." He pointed to the left and told her how to get to 16-03074. His eyes continued to explore her figure with just the right degree of polite interest.

She stepped closer until she was almost inside the hallway. She could feel the warmth of him. "Why," she said suddenly, "you're Mr. Kelsey!"

His smile broadened with some hungry concept of himself that had been fed. "But how did you know, Miss Starre?"

"Yes, she admires you so much. She has a picture of you, Mr. Kelsey. She told me how you won a Golden Star for being so cooperative."

"We all help one another. Miss Davies is such a wonderfully warm and sympathetic girl. Well, Miss Starre, what a coincidence!"

She nodded quickly. She felt that magnetic force, the clicking communion, the way she had always seen it on Tevee. How easy it was, after all, if you looked right and smiled right and said the correct things.

Miss Gloria Tonnencourt stood up, and the three of them seemed subdued and softened in the Tevee light. Kelsey said, "Gloria, this is a friend of mine, a really dear friend, Anita Starre."

There was something wrong. It was under the surface, Alice thought, but it was there. Under the smiles, something tense and wrong and dangerous. She had never felt it before, but she felt it now. It was Gloria, the way the smile seemed set on Gloria's face as she said she was very pleased to meet Miss Starre. It had always been there, that smile, so it couldn't go away, but Alice knew that if she were Miss Tonnencourt she would not feel like smiling. No one could smile, she thought, if they were losing their love. Real love you could die of losing.

They all smiled at one another. Kelsey got three drinks and they drank to one another's happiness as though there was no question that there could be anything else in the world but happiness.

Gloria has to do what's right, Alice thought. No matter how painful, she has to do what's right. I'm lucky because she has to do what's right, because she always has to be a good sport about everything.

They chatted together like good sports for a while, talked about the pop tune of the week, the favorite sports hero of the day, the best Quik-Pik book of the hour, the Sky-Splitter, the Roaromatic Roadeater, the Silver and Golden Stars for cooperation, the Blue Stars for communal feeling. The Carnegie Awards for sociability.

They have to get along, Alice thought gladly. They have to get along. They can't afford to offend one another.

Gloria finally got up, seeming tired in spite of her smile, and said, "I'd better be going now. I—I can see that you two have a real thing for one another already. I—I think it's just—wonderful—so wonderful, really—"

Kelsey didn't seem to hear Gloria at all, hardly seemed to know she was there. He kept looking at Alice. "Please don't go, Gloria," he said as he kept on looking at Alice.

"It's awfully sweet of you to ask me to stay, but I really must go now. It's—it's getting late."

I know how you really feel, Alice thought. I know, I know, somewhere deep inside you feel an awful sickness like death, but on the outside you smile. I know how you feel.

But do you know how you feel anymore, Gloria? Can you feel the way you really feel? What would happen if—

But no matter how Gloria felt, no Mirror on a wall could have been critical of her appearance, her poise, her polite good-sport way of bowing out.

Gloria moved toward the door. Kelsey hurried over there and opened it for her. "You two be happy," Gloria whispered. "You two seem to be so—so very right for an anther."

How could it be so easy? Alice's hand trembled as Kelsey moved toward her. With Gloria it had been so quick, happening so fast, over so easily.

"She's sweet," Alice heard herself saying. But that wasn't true. She only felt that Gloria had been sad. If it had been sweet it was bitter-sweet sadness. But Alice had to forget about Gloria. Gloria was gone. It was like she had never been here at all, as though all those evenings of love had never been. Switch it on, switch it off. It was like Tevee, she thought, like Tevee—

Kelsey asked her to sit down on the couch, and then he was sitting near her, nearer to her. Then he was touching her, his face inches from hers.

And then she was forgetting everything else but Kelsey. It was easy, so easy when you looked and felt right. So easy and she didn't want to think about anything else but Kelsey, dear, sweet, darling Kelsey.

She received him in her arms, with a wild desire, a wild hunger to cover his face with kisses. She felt the intensity taking hold of her, gripping her body, quickening the pounding throb of machinery that was hidden now, hidden away deep and silent and beating now like a human heart.

She kissed his cheek. Her lips strayed over his skin. Her lips glided over his face, felt the moist trembling of his lips.

She felt his trembling, his shuddering sigh, the way his arms convulsed and gripped her, and then she saw the unsettled look, the light in his eyes as he clung to her and at the same time seemed to push her away.

He was frightened. He was trembling, and he was afraid, and his face was flushed.

He stared at her. His lips were trembling. "I—I don't know. What is it? It was never like this."

"Real?" His face had an uncomprehending look, the cheek muscles trembling as he spoke, his voice hollow and frightened. "Something," he whispered. "What is it? I've never felt anything like it. It—it's too much, maybe. Too much or something—I don't know—"

Already I am losing him, she thought. He's going away. Somehow he senses what is wrong, without knowing what it is he knows. In spite of the beautiful surface, he senses that I am not real, not human, not a being at all.

She moved desperately and clutched at him and held him tightly, shocked at his stiffness now, his reluctance, his trembling. She felt tears inside, though they could never show. "Please, please," she whispered.

His voice was shaking. "Listen—it's too much. You scare me. Wait a minute now, let's talk about this. I want to know—"

"Love? This isn't love. It's—it's like anger. It's—I've never known anything like this!"

He closed his eyes. His lips trembled. "I—I felt like I was going to die," he whispered.

He knows, she thought dully. He knows I'm what I am underneath. But he doesn't know that he knows. He can't admit what seems impossible.

He gasped. His body jerked. She looked at the Tevee frame. There was nothing on it suddenly but a frightening, wavering, milky emptiness.

"Due to the possibility of an immediate air-raid, Tevee is dead. All transportation is stopped. Those of you who were thoughtful and cooperative enough with your sponsor to order our emergency entertainment projectors will now turn them on. It will greatly decrease anxiety. Red-out regulations will be in effect for two hours."

Kelsey's face was gray. "Air-raid," he whispered. "It's here. It's really here!"

Somewhere Alice heard screaming. It seemed to fill the walls, the floor, the ceiling and the night itself, everywhere, as though the very air was screaming in some vast agony. The sirens.

She heard a whimpering sound and realized that it was Kelsey. She held him tightly in her arms. He was shivering.

The Tevee screen seemed like a page on which vital print had died, something strangely alive but without sound or meaning, like an exposed brain without thought, like the deadness of an open eye in a corpse.

"All lights will be extinguished for two hours," the voice said. "Everyone will go immediately to their air-raid shelters!"

He didn't seem to hear her. He leaped out of her arms, and she heard furniture crashing as he blundered around wildly in the dark.

She followed him unerringly in the dark, to the stairs, without stumbling. When she found him at the bottom of the stairs in the tunnel leading to the private air-raid shelter, he was whimpering and shivering violently.

She could tell by the way he said it that it meant something else to him, not two hours, but something infinitely longer, unendurably longer, some kind of awful forever.

She helped him into the shelter and closed the thick door. She couldn't understand that kind of loneliness. She had stood in the black lonely closet for years. She had worked alone. She could understand the loneliness of being without love. But this fear of his—it had no meaning for her.

And as she looked at Kelsey cowering in the corner of the shelter, she realized something else—Kelsey himself had very little meaning. He was not what he had seemed. He was empty. He was hollow. He wasn't quite real. That was what his fear was; a fear of discovering he had nothing inside; a horror of the absence of something you could create inside yourself only by being alone.

Alice knew that now. Maybe she had always known it, but now she admitted it to herself.

The shelter was a small square room lined with concrete and lead and steel. There was a large supply of food, and a method of reprocessing the air. A person could live in it for a long time. Alice knew she could. She would have loved being there just with Kelsey, but Kelsey was empty, and there was no way he could give her back her love, nothing in him he could use to share loneliness with her.

"But I love you," she said weakly. "We have one another. We can talk. We can tell one another all about—"

The screaming was in the shelter walls. It quivered in the floor and ceiling and walls. But there was really no sound. Nothing could penetrate here; no sound or light. Kelsey looked around the small enclosure. "It may be longer—"

But the superficial things slipped away and she couldn't remember any of them. She wanted to take him in her arms, but she couldn't do that now because it wasn't real. She couldn't talk about all those meaningless things. Maybe now nothing would be enough to satisfy Kelsey's hollow fear.

With Gloria, with all of them, Alice knew that Kelsey had always been alone. More alone, more horribly alone, than she had ever been. For Kelsey had nothing inside of him to keep him company, or to sincerely share with another.

She tried to comfort him, but he was on his knees, shivering and whimpering. Then he tried to beat his way out through the door. She pulled him back and he fell sobbing on the floor, squirming and rubbing his hands and his face into the floor as though to get some feeling of life from it.

The trembling of the walls and floor continued, very gently as though even that was somehow being polite, as though even that was trying to make things not so discomforting.

Kelsey was whining and sobbing. "I've got to get out—get out. There's a shelter—a communal shelter. The project place—people—lots of people—"

"All right," she said. "Let's take a chance, if you want to. We'll go to that other shelter—with people in it."

But when they got to the top of the stairs and stepped into the living room, the lights went on, the Tevee came to color-sound-life again.

"The threat of the air-raid is over. Due to our wonderful cooperative spirit, the enemy's cowardly attack accomplished little except the minor destruction of a few scattered points. We're sure now that anyone who has not ordered our Cozy-Corner Air-Raid Shelter will do so without further delay! It comes equipped, remember, with three-dimensional Tevee. There is the illusion of real people—"

But Alice wasn't concerned about that. She gave Kelsey a sedative and put him to bed, and then she went to her dark closet and stood in it until Wednesday morning. She had time to think about things, and a wonderful calm came over her, and she knew she didn't care what happened to her now. She was strong enough to live alone, and take whatever was coming to her without fear.

When she shook Kelsey awake Wednesday morning and told him she was Alice, he laughed, shocked and incredulous, trying to appear amused. But she told him about the order blank, and convinced him she really was Alice and Anita Starre did not exist.

He ran and called a robot repair clinic. He was almost incoherent, trying to tell the clinic what had happened, but they finally understood and said they would be right out to take the domestic away.

"I don't understand," he said several times. "No one told you to do such a thing. How could a robot just up and do such a thing?"

"Robots can become inefficient," Kelsey said. "They can wear down a little and have to be repaired. But how could a robot just up and do a thing like this?"

Because of loneliness and the need for love? She smiled. She could smile now. It would have been funny for her to have said such a thing as that.

She didn't care. She heard the jet-truck drop down by the curb outside Kelsey's house. She heard the footsteps coming up the walk, onto the porch. But she didn't care. She was strong enough not to care at all.

She cared not at all for any of them, Master Kelsey included. She cared a little for Julian, for he had understood a little. But she didn't care about any of the others now. They hardly existed! They had nothing! In them, everything had been frozen forever and nothing really moved inside.

You saw the bright surfaces and the smiles as they walked and talked on the street, and for a while you wanted to believe they existed, that they were there. But they weren't really there at all.

She smiled and stood still and waited for them to move toward her. They seemed afraid of her.

There's nothing to be afraid of, not here, not in me, she wanted to say. It's in you that the fear is, for what is more frightening than emptiness and the feel of hollow time going by?